34 Tribune. We've lost a lot of copy boys and others in that area, who had no rea- son to hang on. We anticipate a little trouble there until we can hire some new people. Let's see, a copy boy now gets about fifty-five dollars a week to start. Hell, I was a star reporter at fifty-five a week. The people who have gone on working have had a pay cut, of course-twenty per cent on everything up tu fifteen thuusand and fifty per cent on èverything over that, except for the senior executIves. They took a fifty- per-cent cut across the board. Right now, we have no applicants for posts as senior executives. All along, there has been a very, very good spirit. What we have here is a collection of people with the damnedest pride in the product they turn out. E verv ont:: of them has that pride, whether he has a line in the paper or not. Naturally, he thinks it's a better paper if it has a lot of his lines. But even if it has none, he's proud of it." Catledge glanced at his watch. It was almost eleven. He got up and accom- panied us into the newsrOOlll, where he walked over to the window and took a quick glance duwnward at the sidewalk across the street. "No hopefuls yet," he said, and, turning us over to Marshall Newton, who was leaning against a pillar and lighting a cigar, went back into his office. "The last hundred and fourteen days ha ve been strung together like beads," Newton said. "It's hard to tell them apart when you look back. Each day has been a depressing exercise in futility. You do the job, but you have no sense of accomplishment. Have you notIced the floral offering?" He indicated an 1111 pressively large white azalea on a nearby desk, to which was attached a card reading, "\Ve missed you. W el- C0111e Back! Joe vVolhandler." "I un- derstand he's scnne kind of a television pruducer," Newton said. "It was ad- dressed to the city desk, and came in Wednesday night shortly after the bad news. A real funeral piece." Frank S. Adalns, the city editor, who had just come into the office and was still wearing the jacket of a blue suit, walked over. "How are the omens?" he said. "Anybudy sacrificed an) guats fi d } '" h ..." to n out w 1at s gOIng to appen r "The scuttlebutt out front isn't good," Newton said. Adams headed for his desk. Newton looked at the azalea again and left to use his office phone. Seven men, all in shirtsleeves, were now working at the universal copy desk. Hdrnson Salisbury, director of national correspondence, was reading the Wash- ington Post at his desk nearby. And, a few steps away, Emanuel R. Freedman, foreign-news editor, sat at his desk, looking off into space, with his glasses pushed up onto his forehead. Lester Markel, the Sunday editor, wearing a gray suit, strode into the room and stopped at Frank Adams' desk. "I think we ought to be prepared for everything, including the worst," Markel said. "What? Cyanide?" Adams replied. By eleven-fifteen, some twenty-five people were in the newsroom, most of them sitting at desks at the front of the room, where the lights had been turned on. It was still dark over the seeming- ly endless expanse of reporters' desks, all vacant. The room was strangely devoid of sound and movement. No phones rang, and nobody was typing. The atmusphere was altogether differ- ènt from what it had been on the pre- VIOUS Wednesday. A T the same time on Wednesday, there had been an air of buoyant expectancy everywhere. The optimism was so hIgh that quite a few newsroom people who hadn't been in the building since the strike began crussed the picket line and came In, ready to start work, In the middle of the afternoon. Two of the regular elevator opera- tors had received permission from the union to cross the picket line and were on duty by four o'clock. Three months' accumulation of dust and grÍ1ne had been scrubbed from the reporters' dtsks, and the maskIng tape that had been wrapped around their telephones had been stripped off. For the first time in over a hundred days, the lights were on throughout the news- room. Frank Adams, greeting a col- league, said, "Happy days are here " h ?" agaIn, e " Turner Catledge, asked if a celebra- tion had bt::en arranged, replied, "N oth- ing is planned, but I imagine we will have quite a hysterIcal group" Thomas Campion, the production di- rector, looking enormously dynamic, made a quick visit to the newsroom. "We've got six machinists and six elec- - ,Þ- fþ - - ". - i , ' < U : :, \ " , --: \ ôdi APRIL 1 , 19 (, tncIans already on the job," he said. "Whew, is this exciting! " Many of those who had worked through the strike were beginning to re- fer to it as if it were an event in the past. "During al] that tIme, it was pretty dis- mal in here," John Radosta, the picture editor, said. "A patch of light here, an- other patch there, and the dust and dirt got pretty thick, because, of course, we had no maintenance men. Dust and dirt can become very dispiriting. But we had a few morale-builders. We got Into the habit of bringing in cookies and doughnuts and other tidbits to share with the people in the little pockets of activity around us. I usually stopped at a fruit store on the way to work and picked up a dollar's worth of fresh things. I called it my anti-scurvy cam- paign. " "I brought in hot cross buns," Joseph Herzberg, the newspaper's cultural- news editor, said. "It all helped during those days. People were doing their work, but they were just walking through it. It was a pallid sort of thing. You can feel things changing now. Everybudy's ready to go. It's the old fire-horse tradition, I guess. If anything happens now, it's going tu be bad, very bad. I'll go back and open that buttle of bourbon that's been aging." "w e ought to do something a little more dramatic than that," Jack Gould, the television critic, said. " w 11 " " d H b "" f e, saI erz erg, 1 you want to shoot yuurself, don't do it in the cul- ture department. We've just got straightened up back there." As Wednesday afternoon wore on and reports filtered into the newsroom of delays, wrangling, and booing at the photoengravers' meeting, the kidding and levity died down. By six o'clock, nearly complete silence had settled over the room. Turner Catledge, unsmiling, his head bent slightly forward, walked purposefully from his office to the wire room, looked bnefly at what was com- ing over the A.P. ticker about the unIon meeting, and returned to his office \1arshall Newton was reading a paper- back titled "Sixteen Skeletons from My Closet." Many of his colleagues had also picked up sumething to read. Ted Bernstein, an assistant managing editor, now paid a visit to the wire room and scanned the material coming out of the tickers. ""'....hat's the matter with your machines, Jack?" he said to the head of the wire room. "They're telling us about a freIghter going aground off Japan. Is that new" now?" About a quarter after eight, Frank Adams' phone rang. He picked it up, quickly put it down, rose from his desk,